Current software development environments and platforms (e.g., Eclipse, Application Server environments or SAP's Business Process Platform (BPP)) present a number of technical challenges to the management of such environments and platforms for developers. These technical challenges arise from the ever increasing complexity of the system landscapes, where required information may be distributed and scattered across many information sources. These distributed information sources may contain information that is required by a developer to manage and operate a particular development environment and platform. FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing an example prior art software development environment 100 in which a developer 102 may be required to deal with a number of different and heterogeneous information sources 104, 106 and 108 that together are accessible via an information repository 110 of a software development platform. The information repository 110 may be accessed, for example, by the developer 102 utilizing a computer system 112 that is communicatively coupled to the information repository 110 via a network 114 (e.g., the Internet, a Wide Area Network (WAN) or a Local Area Network (LAN)). A developer 102 may have to deal with several information sources that use different representation formalisms, from natural language, to eXtensible Markup Language (XML), etc. Further, information regarding a particular entity may be scattered across any number of the information sources 104-108.
Because of the scattering and different representation formalisms, a number of technical challenges are presented to developers in ensuring information consistency across multiple information sources 104-108. Typically, many isolated and heterogeneous information sources in different representation formalisms may have to be maintained by the developer 102. This is particularly problematic when the multiple information sources describe a common artifact. Considering, for example, business objects that form a part of an integrated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software system, the structure of business objects may be represented in one information source in XML, while being represented in natural language in another information source. Changes in either of these information sources may lead to inconsistencies.